Mobile communications have changed the way people communicate and mobile phones have been transformed from a luxury item to an essential part of every day life. The use of mobile phones is today dictated by social situations, rather than hampered by location or technology. While voice connections fulfill the basic need to communicate, and mobile voice connections continue to filter even further into the fabric of every day life, the mobile Internet is the next step in the mobile communication revolution. The mobile Internet is poised to become a common source of everyday information, and easy, versatile mobile access to this data will be taken for granted.
Third generation (3G) cellular networks have been specifically designed to fulfill these future demands of the mobile Internet. As these services grow in popularity and usage, factors such as cost efficient optimization of network capacity and quality of service (QoS) will become even more essential to cellular operators than it is today. These factors may be achieved with careful network planning and operation, improvements in transmission methods, and advances in receiver techniques. To this end, carriers need technologies that will allow them to increase downlink throughput and, in turn, offer advanced QoS capabilities and speeds that rival those delivered by cable modem and/or DSL service providers.
In order to meet these demands, communication systems using multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver have recently received increased attention due to their promise of providing significant capacity increase in a wireless fading environment. These multi-antenna configurations, also known as smart antenna techniques, may be utilized to mitigate the negative effects of multipath and/or signal interference on signal reception. It is anticipated that smart antenna techniques may be increasingly utilized both in connection with the deployment of base station infrastructure and mobile subscriber units in cellular systems to address the increasing capacity demands being placed on those systems. These demands arise, in part, from a shift underway from current voice-based services to next-generation wireless multimedia services that provide voice, video, and data communication.
The utilization of multiple transmit and/or receive antennas is designed to introduce a diversity gain and to raise the degrees of freedom to suppress interference generated within the signal reception process. Diversity gains improve system performance by increasing received signal-to-noise ratio and stabilizing the transmission link. On the other hand, more degrees of freedom allow multiple simultaneous transmissions by providing more robustness against signal interference, and/or by permitting greater frequency reuse for higher capacity. In communication systems that incorporate multi-antenna receivers, a set of M receive antennas may be utilized to null the effect of (M−1) interferers, for example. Accordingly, N signals may be simultaneously transmitted in the same bandwidth using N transmit antennas, with the transmitted signal then being separated into N respective signals by way of a set of N antennas deployed at the receiver. Systems that utilize multiple transmit and receive antennas may be referred to as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. One attractive aspect of multi-antenna systems, in particular MIMO systems, is the significant increase in system capacity that may be achieved by utilizing these transmission configurations. For a fixed overall transmitted power and bandwidth, the capacity offered by a MIMO configuration may scale with the increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For example, in the case of fading multipath channels, a MIMO configuration may increase system capacity by nearly M additional bits/cycle for each 3-dB increase in SNR.
For example, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) were the driving forces in establishing and evolving the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation evolutionary cellular mobile system that has grown out of the enormously successful GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard. Basic UMTS with theoretical data rates of up to 2 Mbps has evolved over the last few years to comprise High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA). These standard extensions use advanced signal processing techniques and network management to enhance available data throughputs. Theoretical downlink rates of up to 14.4 Mbps and uplink rates of 5.8 Mbps may be achieved and are a further step towards truly mobile broadband services.
Following the standardization of HSDPA and HSUPA, 3GPP members launched a new initiative named Long Term Evolution (LTE), concerned primarily with the evolution of the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA) Network to support future services with even higher data rates, lower latency and more flexibility in spectrum usage and use scenarios for packet-based mobile telecommunication systems. Regarding the physical layer, bandwidths from as little as 1.25 MHz up to 20 MHz were agreed upon to provide the required spectral flexibility and in December 2005, it was decided that the downlink would be using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), whereas the uplink will use Single-Carrier—Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA). Furthermore, it was agreed that MIMO operations will be incorporated as an optional, yet fundamental design feature, with up to four antennas that may be provided at both the user equipment (UE—mobile device) and the Node B (a base station in UMTS). The most effective use of MIMO technologies may require consideration of MIMO-specific design features from the outset and incorporation of various features that permit MIMO usage to leverage its potential beyond a mere add-on feature. Target peak data rates of this Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) system are as high as 100 Mbps in the downlink with a 20 MHz bandwidth and up to 50 Mbps in a 20 MHz uplink bandwidth.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.